Viewpoint: There’s something fishy about Russian hacking

Friday, August 11, 2017

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For many months now there has been a constant torrent of daily news through all the forms of our national media that the Russians interfered in our election process and made it possible for Donald Trump to be elected as our President. The sheer repetition of this story for all this time has led millions of Americans to believe it’s true. Somebody has been desperately trying to make us believe this because it serves their purposes for our country, and their efforts have been convincing to many in the government and many citizens who walk the streets and inhabit the homes of our nation.

A serious outcome of all this furor is that, instead of forming more friendly and collaborative relationships with Russia and China, we are now moving steadily and perhaps inevitably toward the reality of World War III, a disaster that would surely affect all the people of the world.

It’s been pretty clear from WikiLeaks messages culled from the records of the Democratic National Committee that the Democratic leadership found ways to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders to assure that Hillary Clinton would be elected as our next President. But then came the general election, which was considered by most to be a shoo-in for her, but then how did Donald Trump manage to win? There must have been some dirty work at the crossroads, and hence the subsequent months of accusations against President Trump, his family members and others, the Russians, and then strident calls for Trump’s impeachment, or even his assassination. The Russian connection has been the thread in this informational avalanche, and investigations are underway to prove its truth. The fact is the allegations are not true. We’ve been misled.

On July 24, 2017 a select group of former U.S. Intelligence officers including NSA specialists -

a group of knowledgeable and experienced professionals, known by the name of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) – issued a report on the meticulous and thorough investigation they made about this charge of Russian hacking of the DNC server. The following quotes are drawn from their report:

“Independent cyber-investigators have now completed the kind of forensic work that the intelligence assessment did not do. Oddly, the ‘hand-picked’ intelligence analysts contented themselves with ‘assessing’ this and ‘assessing’ that. In contrast, the investigators dug deep and came up with verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of the alleged Russian hack.”

“July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto to an external storage device. That speed is many times faster than what is physically possible with a hack.”

“It thus appears that the purported ‘hack’ of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external storage device. Moreover, the forensics performed on the metadata reveal there was a subsequent synthetic insertion – a cut-and-paste job using a Russian template, with the clear aim of attributing the data to a ‘Russian hack.’ This was all performed in the East Coast time zone.”

There was no Russian hack. It was an inside clandestine job at the DNC. What does that tell you about what’s going on?

The VIPS group sends memoranda to Presidents “when they believe former intelligence colleagues have gotten something important wrong. Their first memorandum was sent to George W, Bush the day Colin Powell gave his famous U.N. speech where they warned the “unintended consequences were likely to be catastrophic,’ should the U.S. attack Iraq and ‘justify’ the war on intelligence that we retired intelligence officers could readily see as fraudulent and driven by a war agenda.”

Several days after this report was made public and widely disseminated, both the House and Senate, on the basis of other information fed them, voted nearly unanimously to issue sanctions on Russia as punishment for their “meddling” in our election.

Again, what’s going on and why? I suggest you ask your Congresswoman and Senators, and make up your own mind.